John Marshall’s brother, Charles sent an e mail to as many of John’s friends as he could contact. I know it has been very helpful to those who have recieved it. With Charles’ permission I have include it here. Thank you Charles.  There are more messages on John’s facebook page

Dear friends of John
 
It may help you to begin to come to terms with this awful, awful thing to know something about the circumstances of John’s death. I am sending this to those of you for whom I have an email address. Please do forward it on to anyone else you think would wish to read it.

If this is the first you have heard of John’s death, then please accept my sincere apologies for not calling you first. I shall post some photos on John’s Facebook wall shortly.
 
John had spent Christmas in Pembury with our parents, me and my wife Alex, and our sons, William and James. He stayed at Pembury until Wednesday evening. Christmas was just great, “the best ever”, as we all kept saying at the time. John helped Dad with the Xmas dinner, bringing his humour and cooking skills to calm the kitchen. In the afternoon we opened presents - imaginative and fun presents from him: a book for Alex on Origami and a handbag which she loves (do you know another man who could risk tasking a punt on a handbag and get it right?); William had a book of fairytales, beautifully illustrated – it’s already dog-eared and well-thumbed. Jokingly, I asked him if he’d got me anything: ” a smorgasbord of presents” he said, and he had: a super bottle of whisky, short stories by Dürrenmatt, a CD of ‘Come Ye Sons of Art’ with Quintus. Typical John that: the generosity and the fun, and that knowing of each of us and what would makes us happy. 
 
John adored his nephews and they loved him. William is nearly five and James is 7 months. He just loved getting up close and personal with James down there on the floor with him, their faces a couple of inches apart chatting away together: “a-baba, a-baba..”; and James, all happy to have someone to chat with, “a-bababababa – Ba!”. John said that if James came to live with him he wouldn’t be able to speak a word of English by the time he went to school, because they would spend their whole time just babbling away to one another.
 
In recent months he and William had started to get very close. He visited us in Switzerland in November and they spent four days building railways and reading stories aloud. I can still hear William running through the house shouting, “Uncle John! Uncle John!” when he wanted to show him something. John and the four of us went to The Hopbine at Petteridge for an evening meal on the 27th December. Getting there too early we sat in the car and John had William on his lap showing him how to play the games on his mobile phone… I have John’s mobile with me now and William is always asking to play the games. I think for him it is a way of being with him still. The last evening we saw John, William asked him for the first time if he could come on his own and stay the night with him. John was thrilled.
 
That last evening, we made plans for the coming few days: he and I would go to eat at Il Vesuvio on the Thursday evening – he loved it there and had taken Alex there for lunch that same day. On the Friday evening he was going to a party with people from CREATE, and then we would all meet on New Years Eve for supper at his house.   
 
He had agreed to take my mum to a Drs appointment on the 29th December. She called him at 8:40am to tell him that the appointment was at 9:50 and they agreed that he would pick her up at 9:30. 9:30 came and went and there was no sign of John, so I drove her there. By the time we got back, still no John. Mum tried his landline and his mobile but there was no reply, so Alex and I drove round with the boys to his flat. Although it wasn’t like John to miss an appointment, I wasn’t worried. I felt sure that we’d find his car wasn’t there and that he’d had a breakdown somewhere and left his mobile at home; or find him in the driveway changing a wheel; or even fast asleep in bed having gone back for a couple more minutes before having to get up.
 
The car was there and the front door was locked. I managed to get into the flat and found John lying on his back in bed, unconscious. He was still in his night clothes. The ambulance arrived within minutes. His blood pressure was through the roof indicating a stroke. They rushed him to Pembury Hospital where a CT scan showed a haemorrhage affecting the brain stem. By now he was unable to breathe by himself and was on a ventilator. In the afternoon they moved him to Intensive Care and it was there that they performed the tests that would show that he was dead.  At 4:30am on the 30th December they switched off the ventilator and his heart stopped at 4.35am.
 
Returning to his flat there was a full bowl of cereal on the kitchen surface and a spoon. I imagine he had got up after speaking to Mum, gone into the kitchen and prepared his breakfast, felt unwell and returned to bed to lie down. The Drs have told us that it would have been very quick and painless and he would have known little about it, if anything. He probably felt dizzy or sick in the kitchen and then passed out when he lay down. If the bleeding had affected a different part of the brain then he may have survived, though perhaps with impaired movement or speech. But a bleed which puts pressure on the brain stem - that part of the brain which controls the basics of existence – is almost always fatal, and in those few cases where people do survive the damage to the brain is massive. They have also said that there is nothing that could have been done to prevent it. Even if he had been in hospital when it had happened, and even if they had been watching for it, it would have been the same. A haemorrhage likes this happens either as a result of a blow to the head, high blood pressure or a weakness in a blood vessel (an aneurysm). We do not think he had a head injury and had he had high blood pressure I think he would have been on medication for it, which he wasn’t. He had to visit his GP from time to time for things like the sty on his eye, and I feel sure that at one of these they would have checked his blood pressure. Which leaves us with the fact that it was probably an aneurysm, and there is apparently little chance of them finding this through a scan, as it is a weakness in the structure of the blood vessel that you are born with, and is usually minute.
 
We hope to get an obituary in this Friday’s Courier and will let you know just as soon as we have details of the Memorial Service.
 
Like you, we love John so, so much. He is irreplacable. We miss his love of life and people; his lovely laugh and humour; his kindness and warmth; his intellect and intelligence, but more than that, his heart; his instinct for what is right and just; how he could take the world as it is but still strive for a better way; his big, big cuddles; the fun of just being with him… We have lost a dear son, the best big brother, the best brother-in-law and the greatest uncle. But more than that, we have lost a wonderful, wonderful man.
 
Charles